TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Family slams ‘monster’ teacher for alleged sex acts with their son in classroom.

IT CERTAINLY SHOWS THAT CNN IS: CNN’s Fawning Over JFK’s Philandering Shows Stormy Daniels Is Irrelevant.

ROGER SIMON: Corporations Endanger Free Speech with Ingraham Boycott.

Read the whole thing.

JAMES BOVARD: After the FBI’s Pulse nightclub failure, why should we trust James Comey anymore? We shouldn’t.

Federal prosecutors flourished the FBI memo of Salman’s confession as the ultimate proof of her perfidy. But the memo contained false statements and contradictions which even the government could not sweep away. After the trial ended, the jury foreman (who wished to remain anonymous) notified the Orlando Sentinel: “I wish that the FBI had recorded their interviews with Ms. Salman as there were several significant inconsistencies with the written summaries of her statements.”

In this landmark case — as well as in the 2016 interview of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn — the FBI chose to rely on its agents’ ex post facto memos instead of the words and voices of individuals it was investigating. Four years ago, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the FBI and other federal agencies would henceforth record such interviews but little has changed from the J. Edgar Hoover era.

But that was not the biggest blow to federal credibility. On the day after the Pulse club massacre, then-FBI chief James Comey promised: “We will leave no stone unturned and we will work all day and all night to understand the path to that terrible night. … I don’t see anything in reviewing our work that our agents should have done differently, but we’ll look at it in an open and honest way, and be transparent about it.” But Comey provided zero transparency over the following 11 months prior to President Trump’s firing him last May. The FBI even redacted Mateen’s endorsement of ISIS in the initial transcripts they released of his discussions with hostage negotiators on the night of the shooting.

Comey complained of the difficulty of investigating lone wolf terrorists: “Our work is very challenging. We are looking for needles in a nationwide haystack.” But the key player in this case was in the FBI’s back pocket all along.

Eleven days after Noor Salman’s trial began, the Justice Department belatedly admitted that the killer’s father, Seddique Mateen, had been a paid FBI informant for 11 years, starting in 2005. . . . The FBI’s Orlando debacle follows too many other cases in which the FBI failed to heed obvious warning signs of terrorist attacks — from 9/11 to the Fort Hood, Texas, killing spree to the Boston Marathon bombing to a Garland, Texas, attack spurred by an FBI agent. If not for the federal prosecution of Noor Salman, we likely never would have learned that Seddique Mateen was on the FBI payroll. How many other self-damning bombshells remain hidden in FBI files?

There’s something terribly wrong at the FBI.

DONNA BRAZILE: Democratic Party Told Me ‘Shut up, Donna’ and ‘I Said Hell No.’ “‘They will drive right past you and will come after you in the last 48 hours of the campaign,’ former DNC chief warned African-American voters.”

THE PROBLEM WITH PENSION FUNDING IS THAT POLITICIANS LIKE TO STEAL IT: Why Public Pension Pre-Funding Matters (An Explainer).. “And this is the story that’s repeated over and over again. Pensions are made more generous — with high accrual rates, low retirement eligibility ages, generous cost of living provisions — as a means of providing more generous compensation to state and local employees, without actually needing to pay anything from the current year’s budget. Costs are deferred until well after current legislators have themselves retired.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: 25% Of Harvard Law Students Suffer From Depression, 20% Are At Heightened Risk Of Suicide.

Cost of attending Harvard Law School: $95,800 per year.

OF COURSE HE DID: Mueller Found a Very Dishonest Way to Shroud His Investigation in Secrecy.

Special counsel Robert Mueller and his deputy Andrew Weissmann filed a three-page notice on Monday arguing that Alex Van Der Zwaan should not be allowed to file Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests related to the ongoing Russia investigation.

As the notice points out, Van Der Zwaan originally agreed to waive his rights to “request or receive” such records from the government during his plea agreement. In the notice, Mueller claims his legal arguments are being filed because the court “drew attention” to a similar waiver agreement during Richard Gates‘ recent arraignment.

That’s likely true, but it strains credulity to think there’s not at least something else going on behind the scenes here. One plausible scenario: Van Der Zwaan’s attorneys have signaled their intent to challenge the government’s FOIA waiver because there’s not much in the way of precedent that actually binds the court to enforce the waiver.

Such waivers are generally considered enforceable, but this is a hotly contested body of law and civil libertarians–as well as defense attorneys–frequently press the issue in the U.S. court system. The Supreme Court has yet to rule on the exact question, so consider this all in flux.

Read the whole thing.

FROM AL HUNT, SOME ACTUAL GOOD ADVICE FOR DEMOCRATS: When You Insult Trump Voters, You Make It Hard To Get Them Back.

There are legitimate criticisms of Trump’s policies, personnel choices, temperament and integrity. These should be pointed and sharp without getting in the pit.

Hillary Clinton’s remarks should be cause for greater concern. During the 2016 campaign, she derided half of Trump’s followers as “deplorables.” Her speech in India created a field day for Fox News and Republican campaigns that are trying to tie her remarks to Democrats like Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill, who is running for re-election in a state that Trump easily carried in 2016.

But the payoff for Democrats — the “dopamine hit” — is quite specifically in feeling superior to other Americans. That makes self-discipline in such things difficult.

HMM: Clouds form over Iran deal as Trump deadline nears.

It was Trump’s choice of John Bolton as his incoming national security advisor that Iran deal supporters have seen as the biggest death knell for the deal.

Bolton penned an op-ed while the deal was being negotiated that was bluntly titled, “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.” He also encouraged Trump to “abrogate the Iran nuclear deal in his first days in office” last year.

Tillerson may have been hoping for a framework agreement with the Europeans that would allow Trump to save face without killing the deal, experts said, but Pompeo and Bolton are unlikely to accept something that’s mostly symbolic.

“The views of Bolton and Pompeo matter quite a bit” to the success or failure of the European negotiations, Taleblu said. “I don’t think both of them will settle for anything that’s just crossing Ts and dotting Is.”

Before Obama’s 2015 deal, Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons but hemmed in by sanctions — and was believed to be at the “breaking point” as recently as 2014. Under the deal, Iran is still pursuing nuclear weapons (at a slightly slower pace), but is far less hindered by sanctions.

The real trick is whether Trump can pull the Europeans along on a new and meaningful sanctions regime.

REMINDER: Winnie Mandela’s Ex-Bodyguard Tells of Killings She Ordered. “Mr. Richardson, 48, who is serving a life sentence for the killing of 14-year-old Stompie Seipei, described beating, torturing and killing people whenever ‘mommy’ (his name for Mrs. Mandela) asked him to do so. . . . Mr. Richardson told of using garden shears to kill Stompie Seipei in 1989 after beating him for days. He said Mrs. Mandela participated in the beatings, using her hands, fists and a whip. But she never did any of the killing, he said.”

More here:

The following five years were increasingly controversial. In 1986 she made a speech in which she talked about achieving liberation from apartheid by using “necklaces” – a reference to the brutal murder of suspected collaborators by putting tyres round their necks and setting them alight. There was also the matter of an opulent £125,000 house built in one of the poorest areas in the country.

The most serious allegations, however, stemmed from the activities of her personal bodyguards, the so-called Mandela United Football Club. Reports of their brutality were commonplace in Soweto and her house was attacked in 1988 by local people who had had enough.

Mrs Mandela refused to curb the team’s activities, however, and the following year came the decisive incident. A 14-year-old activist, Stompei Seipei Moketsi, was kidnapped by her guards and later found murdered. The ANC leadership declared that she was out of control but Nelson Mandela, in jail and in ill-health, refused to repudiate her.

Worth keeping in mind, particularly when looking at South Africa’s present state.

DIVERSITY IS OUR STRENGTH! Students pressure Brown to invite more conservative speakers.

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HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Arkansas, Kentucky Move To Curtail Tenure. I predict that this will be used to tighten the left’s grip on academia, not loosen it.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Ingraham Stays, Andy’s Cash Money Windfall and Much, Much More. “Operation Rehabilitate Andy McCabe has been in full swing following the FBI’s decision to fire the former senior official. Whatever is in that Inspector General report must be pretty bad if they have to get in front of it with a PR blitz.”

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY:  Joseph Stalin became General Secretary of the Communist Party on April 3, 1922.  It brings to mind a limerick by the great historian Robert Conquest:

There was an old bastard named Lenin

Who did two or three million men in

That’s a lot to have done in

But where he did one in

That old bastard Stalin did ten in.

Conquest wasn’t always so lighthearted in discussing the scourge of communism.  But now and then a guy has to “tell it true” in verse.

CHANGE: In a wide-ranging conversation, Prince Mohammed bin Salman also recognized the Jewish peoples’ right to “their own land.”

The well-protected Prince Mohammed does not seem particularly worried about mortal threats, however. He was jovial to the point of ebullience when I met him at his brother’s compound outside Washington (his brother, Prince Khalid bin Salman, is the Saudi ambassador to the U.S.). Prince Mohammed (who is known widely by his initials, MbS) seemed eager to download his heterodoxical, contentious views on a number of subjects—on women’s rights (he appears doubtful about the laws that force Saudi women to travel with male relatives); on Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, who is, in the prince’s mind, worse than Hitler; and on Israel. He told me he recognizes the right of the Jewish people to have a nation-state of their own next to a Palestinian state; no Arab leader has ever acknowledged such a right.

Message sent to the Palestinians: You can stick a fork in “right to return” — it’s done.

HMM: Trump Freezes Syria Aid Funds, Sends Mixed Messages On Anti-ISIS Strategy.

The hold on the money and the status of the anti-ISIS campaign in Syria will be discussed at a National Security Council meeting next week. Trump reportedly ordered the funding to be frozen after reading a report about it in The Washington Post, U.S. officials told Reuters.

The Pentagon has estimated that ISIS has surrendered about 98 percent of its territory in Iraq and Syria, but U.S. military leaders are still concerned by Trump’s calls to reverse course, says Richard Engel, a reporter for MSNBC, who just returned from Syria. They say withdrawing the nearly 2,000 U.S. troops too early would leave the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces in a lurch.

“It is a very sensitive time where the U.S. can see the end zone, can smell the finish line, and if we leave prematurely, ISIS comes back and this partner — will be left to fend for themselves against Turkey which is not an adversary that they are in a position to confront,” Engel tells Here & Now’s Peter O’Dowd.

If American troops withdraw, the Kurds will have to fend for themselves against Turkish forces, who they are fighting in northern Syria. The U.S. remains stuck in the middle of a conflict between two allies – the Kurds and Turkey – while also weighing the need to maintain some sort of military presence in Syria in order to prevent ISIS from rising again.

As always in the Middle East: It’s complicated.

STANDING UP FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE AS USUAL: NY Dem Rep. Maloney Has Stake in Company Notorious for Evicting Tenants.

SOLID STATE’S EVIDENCE: Heart rate recorded by smart device worn by woman, 57, ‘bashed to death by her daughter-in-law reveals she was the victim of an ambush attack.’

ANOTHER PRO-SANCTUARY CITY CLAIM BITES THE DUST: Ask a defender of sanctuary cities to defend the policy and their first argument invariably is immigrants fearing deportation won’t help local crime fighters who cooperate with the feds. We hear it so often, it’s become a truism, part of the governing assumptions underlying of the debate about illegal immigration.

But guess what? There’s as much credible, concrete evidence for this sanctuary claim as there is for the proposition that Nancy Pelosi’s secret pleasure is watching Beta tapes (remember those?) of old Ronald Reagan speeches. LifeZette ace Brendan Kirby has the details on a new report out today from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).

This group is an advocate of tough immigration enforcement, to be sure, but, as FAIR’s Matthew O’Brien told Kirby, “Illegal immigrants aren’t afraid of ICE. I mean, come on, we have DACA kids chaining themselves to the Capitol, refusing to leave.”

ANTISOCIAL MEDIA: Zuckerberg slams Apple, unveils network’s chilling ambitions.

The founder of the world’s most popular social platform outlined his ambitions for Facebook to act as a democratic system, with an independent “Supreme Court”, which people will be able to petition for their content to be restored.

“I think in any kind of good-functioning democratic system, there needs to be a way to appeal,” said the 33-year-old, positioning the social media network almost as its own state, although staff are not elected. “I think we can build that internally as a first step.

“What I’d really like to get to is an independent appeal. So maybe folks at Facebook make the first decision based on the community standards that are outlined, and then people can get a second opinion. You can imagine some sort of structure, almost like a Supreme Court, that is made up of independent folks who don’t work for Facebook, who ultimately make the final judgment call on what should be acceptable speech in a community that reflects the social norms and values of people all around the world.”

“Social norms and values” around the world include everything from constitutional recognition of individual rights, to forced female genital mutilation, and all the way to ethnic cleansing and genocide — and everybody gets a vote on who is allowed to post what?

Perhaps Facebook would be less creepy if its CEO weren’t so blithely ignorant.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Law School Applicants From Top Colleges Decreased 7% In 2017, Down 45% Since 2008.